Don’t Jump on the Ban-Wagon

Recent attempts to outlaw the DS (Workers Party) raise questions about our current conceptions of democracy, freedom and tolerance



The Czech Supreme Court’s rejection of the government-requested ban on the anti-Roma, far right Workers Party (DS) will doubtless have many ‘liberal’ folk cursing or crying over their fair-trade coffee. However, on closer inspection, supporters of true democracy and freedom may well have reason to cheer what ostensibly seems to be a victory for a fairly reprehensible bunch.

Acting on the advice of the Interior Ministry, headed by well known friend-of-freedom Ivan Langer, the Czech government recently sought to ban the Workers’ Party for violating the constitution in at least four major ways. In the run up to the verdict, The Post reported that Klara Kalibova of Czech NGO ‘Tolerance’ supported a ban despite admitting that the Government presented no serious legal argument. Thankfully, presiding Judge Šimíček didn’t agree, stating that
“The government produced no evidence of the radicalization of the party’s activities with the ultimate goal of seizing power through non-democratic means, or of its violation of the Right to Assembly Act. The proceedings before this court did not show that the Workers’ Party’s activities, as documented by the government, provide reasons to dissolve it.”

Even if Šimíček had upheld the ban, DS Chairman Tomas Vandas had insisted that they would simply form a new party with the same agenda, although under a different name, highlighting the practical difficulties of this approach to dealing with difference in a democracy. Kalibova was undeterred by this and, presumably speaking in the spirit of Tolerance, declared that the fight to ban any such organization would continue, as this is “a battle between right and wrong.”

The ODS Government’s latest attempt to demarcate the acceptable bounds of democratic society and limit the public sphere come against a backdrop that includes the successful banning of the Young Communists (KSM: Komunisticky Svaz Mladeze) in 2008 and talk of trying to ban the main Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSCM).

Many people, looking back in history, and to its supposed end - when Western liberal market democracy claimed victory over collapsed communism - would cheer these moves. However, it is worth considering what implications banning political parties has for our vision and practice of democracy as well as for our conceptions of politics and freedom in the Czech Republic and beyond.


Widen the lens, narrow the view
Czech Republic is far from being the only country to ban or consider banning political parties, with numerous examples around Europe fuelling the fire of debate on the ethics and efficacy of such moves.

In Germany, there have been repeated attempts by successive governments to ban the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands) which is held to represent resurgent neo-nazism and as such violate clause 2 of Article 21 of Germany’s constitution (written by UK and US lawyers and imposed by the allies) which states that

“Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.”

However, no ban has been enforced and in 2003 the Schroeder government suffered a significant humiliation when the constitutional court threw out the case against the NPD because their inner circle had been so comprehensively penetrated by government agents and informants. These agents had also authored several of the key pieces of evidence against the NPD including anti-Semitic texts and the party had, in several instances, been effectively responding to state diktat.

In Belgium, the right-wing, nationalist party the Vlaams Blok was formed in the late seventies, appealing to Flemish concerns about unfair representation and resource distribution and calling for Flemish independence. The Blok grew in popularity, polling progressively higher totals in national and European elections, reaching 11% and 14% respectively, until in 2004 it was banned for “permanently inciting discrimination and racial segregation”. Despite this, a new and similar party, the Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) was quickly formed and is, by some measures, the largest in Belgium gaining up to 25% of the vote. The party is kept out of government by a Cordon Sanitaire imposed by mainstream parties, raising the questions of democratic representation. These questions are also reflected in the contradiction between the aforementioned second clause of Article 21 of the German constitution and the first, which reads

“Political parties shall participate in the formation of the political will of the people. They may be freely established.”

In Spain, the banning of pro-independence, left-wing Basque parties drew “concern” from UN special rapporteur on human rights, Martin Scheinin, and followed the 2002 ban on Herri Batasuna, the political wing of ETA. In the UK, while no parties have been banned recently, just last month controversial Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders was prevented from even entering the country and there have been many calls to ostracize Avigdor Lieberman, the right winger who is likely to be Israel’s next foreign minister.


Banning demeans us all
The argument for banning largely follows the line taken by the German constitution, that ‘extremist’ parties threaten the state itself or the nature of democracy within it. In the Czech case, this has been the line taken over the KSM and that has been proposed in the past in relation to the KSCM, largely for their commitment to returning the means of production to public ownership. With regard to the DS, the situation was less clear as, despite their ties to the NPD and other foreign right-wing groups, they were largely brought to court over their anti-Roma stance and overtly xenophobic views. While reprehensible, it is interesting to note that the Czech state felt itself incapable of defending Roma rights and freedoms through normal judicial mechanisms.

When a party is banned for the reasons given above, the government is in effect saying that these views are not admissible to the public sphere: that they are dangerous to the very practice of democracy itself and threaten both the state and the people in it. As Klara Kalibova put it, the DS was dangerous because it was “getting [to] some of the so-called real Czech people”.

Disregarding Kalibova’s de-Czechification or de-personification of those who hold different views to herself, this is reminiscent of the shutting down of the public sphere under Husak’s project of ‘Normalisation’, as is the unwillingness to seriously consider why the KSCM still gets 20% of the vote or why only 25% of young Czechs think life is better now than under Communism.

This reasoning supposes that we, the people, are easily led sheep, incapable of acting as democratic citizens and differentiating between a political plurality and the vicious views of xenophobes and wannabe dictators. It assumes that enough of us actually hold extreme opinions or are all too easily swayed by the weasel words of those who do. Therefore, for our own individual and collective good, we must be protected from these opinions and those who hold them, lest they activate our latent greed, stupidity and prejudice.

This view only gains traction if the demos has become so disenfranchised, disengaged and de-politicised as to see these extreme views as offering a better representation of themselves and their view of people and society than any of the other options on the political table. This is in fact where the true danger lies, as this depoliticisation is exactly one of the unfinished projects of ‘end of history’ neoliberal, post-political governance. Such governance disguises large political decisions behind facades of naturalized economics portrayed as science, managerial - technocratic decision making or otherwise takes decisions out of the contestable realm of politics on the grounds of security. This, combined with the convergence of political parties in many parts of the world around a ‘centre’ that has shifted quite dramatically to the right in the last 30 years, leaves people feeling disconnected and with the feeling that politics is a game played elsewhere, by other people.

Win the argument, don’t ignore it
However, this project is indeed incomplete and by getting engaged, holding our politicians to account for what they promise and demanding that politics should not be reduced to tactical voting for ‘the least bad option’, we can defeat both patronizing control and dangerous extremism.

On practical grounds, we should also oppose the banning of political parties or of the airing of apparently abhorrent views. The philosopher Judith Butler has argued that banning or censoring often has the effect of actually propagating the views that the banning authority was trying to restrict and that the attempt to censor endows them with a power and a platform that they otherwise lacked. The example of Geert Wilders, who until recently was a largely unknown figure in the UK, is a case in point with Wilders becoming a martyr for free speech and his xenophobic opinions being aired on national television.

This is not to deny the potentially destructive and exclusionary power of language, or of particular discourses, which can make people feel like outsiders and make it more likely that they will live in fear or identify themselves as an under-class, with fewer freedoms and opportunities than others. These are the real dangers that are posed by the views of the DS. The question of who has the authority to outlaw certain views and why they do so also becomes pertinent here. It is chillingly ironic to imagine a new control society in which first they came for the communists and we did not stand up, then they came for the fascists and we did not stand up and when they came for us, there was no one or no grounds to stand up for us.

However, rather than banning views or parties, we need to engage ourselves in continually thinking about what our views actually are and asking ourselves why we think what we think and believe what we believe. We need to then take these views into the public, political sphere to discuss them with others who may share some or none of opinions. This is the beginning of reclaiming politics for the people and demanding real representation instead of merely complying with the current consensus of corporate interests that has filled the post-89 political vacuum. This public, political engagement based on private, personal reflection will allow us to win the arguments against proponents of xenophobia, exclusion and anti-democracy, rather than perpetrating these intolerant attitudes in the name of defeating them.

Originally Published in The Prague Post on 16/04/2009

Debt of Gratitude: The Meaning of ‘No!’ in Irish

Why an Irish “No!” does not mean “No.”

Amid the whooping of campaigners and the sound of jaws dropping around the chancelleries and boardrooms of Europe, the returning officer delivered the verdict that should never have come. Despite the warnings, the thinly veiled threats, and attempts at blackmail, the Irish electorate rejected the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty in a vote of 54 to 46 percent. In practice this gave the no campaign a majority of more than 100,000 on a turnout of more than 1.5 million.

This unexpected rejection has triggered a wave of panic amongst EU and national political elites, with politicians and commentators falling over themselves to proclaim the dangers of rejecting Europe and seeking to brand this as anything other than a rejection of the Lisbon Treaty itself. The furore in the aftermath of the vote and the differing reactions to it are illustrative of the machinations of power within the EU and its member states and raise many larger issues, which are of significance to us all.

Phoenix from the Flames
The Lisbon Treaty came into being as a result of the hard won compromise, driven by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, which enabled the EU to salvage something from the wreckage of the EU Constitution which was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. The treaty, like its more grandly titled predecessor, sought to restructure and reinvigorate the EU’s institutions and streamline its decision-making processes. It was hoped that this would enable the EU to function better, giving it the appropriate tools to manage its affairs with 27 members, rather than struggling to cope with its existing institutions and rules, many of which had been designed when it had six members.

The key provisions of the treaty included the creation of a permanent president of the EU council, serving for two and a half years, rather than the current system of rotating six-month presidencies among the member states; the creation of a position equivalent to that of a Foreign Minister or Secretary of State, that would combine the roles currently filled by “High Representative” Javier Solana and the Directorate General for External Relations, Commissioner Benita Ferrero Waldner, in the Council and the Commission respectively; and harmonising all the EU’s previous treaties (Rome, Maastricht, etc.) into one, thus creating a simpler and more transparent foundation for the working of the Union.

The Lisbon Treaty aimed to provide greater legitimacy for the EU by giving a more substantial role to the European Parliament as well as to the parliaments of member states. Crucial elements also included the enshrining of the Charter of Fundamental Rights in EU law and the removal of national vetoes in several areas, to speed up decision-making. Crucially, the treaty needed to be approved unanimously, requiring all 27 EU member states to ratify it through their own national mechanisms. Ireland is the only country in the Union where this process legally requires that a referendum be held.

None of this seems like earth-shatteringly controversial stuff, rather, just bureaucratic tidying, so what happened to make the Irish vote “No!” so decisively?

Hostage to their own fortune
Before the referendum, many commentators and politicians had focused on, or taken comfort in, the idea that Ireland, as one the countries perceived to have benefited most from membership of the European Union, should not reject the treaty. Commentators in The Independent (UK) and The Globe & Mail (Canada) focused on the more than 30 billion Euros that the Irish have received in subsidies, the emergence of Ireland from the UK’s shadow and the way that Ireland has taken a place on the world stage, supposedly as a result of its EU membership. The Financial Times (UK) summed up these arguments when it stated that:

‘It seems extraordinary that the Irish could be so apparently ungrateful.’

The Irish referendum has shown that, despite the best efforts of the Euro elite, bribery is not always enough to get your way, even when it is combined with bullying. The French Foreign Minister Bernhard Kouchner, founder of Medicins sans Frontieres and no stranger to trying to bend other countries’ governments to his will warned darkly that the Irish would be the “first victims” if they voted no.

Both during the campaign and in the aftermath of the “No!” vote, attempts have been made to portray the “No!” campaign as an unholy alliance of nutjobs and fundamentalists of one kind or another. As the acclaimed novelist Colm Toibin put it when writing in The Guardian, “The Lisbon Treaty was a gift for every crank in Ireland.” The UK’s former Europe Minister, Denis MacShane, chose to play on British fears and prejudices by emphasising the role of Sinn Fein (for long the political wing of the IRA) and the Socialist Workers Party.

In many of Europe’s corridors of power, the immediate reaction to the result was to pretend that it hadn’t happened and essentially did not matter. Commission President José Manuel Baroso insisted that the ratification process should continue in the countries that had not yet rubber stamped the treaty, including the Czech Republic. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier stated: “We’re sticking firmly to our goal of putting this treaty into effect.”

However, as the scale of the rejection became clear, and with growing acceptance that this result may have been repeated had other countries held referendums, a different approach began to emerge.

Imitating the reaction of Jean-Claude Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and an ardent federalist, to the French and Dutch “no” votes in 2005, it became paramount to state that the Irish had rejected many things, but not the treaty itself.

A Guardian editorial noted that the Irish government “allowed the Lisbon treaty to become a hostage to general public discontent,” implying that the recent upheavals in Irish domestic politics and dissatisfaction with the Irish political elite were to blame for the “no” vote, rather than the content of the treaty itself. This is the same tune that was played after the French “no” vote in 2005.

Further echoes of the last EU train wreck can be heard in another set of arguments that has tried to brand the Irish voter, described by one commentator as “any clown with a pen,” as incapable of understanding the treaty and the “No!” vote as being an endorsement of their own ignorance. The Financial Times combined these two points, arguing that:

“Putting the Treaty to such a plebiscite is absurd, [since many Irish voters] will vote ‘No’ simply because they do not understand the Treaty [and] others want to register a protest against the political establishment that is all on the ‘Yes’ side.”


Smearing the “No!” Campaign
The British commentator and former Blair confidante Will Hutton went further, alleging that the “No!” campaign was based on lies and that the treaty actually went a long way to addressing voters’ concerns. Surely if this was the case then the “Yes” campaign, backed by all four major Irish political parties and the bulk of the mainstream media, should have been able to expose the lies and set the record straight. That they were unable to do this reveals two key points.

Firstly, it should be noted that the treaty – almost 300 pages of dense Brusselese – was not an easy document to sell and even Irish PM Brian Cowen admitted he had not read it all. This certainly did leave aspects of the treaty open to interpretation and to speculation on issues such as abortion, conscription to any future European army, and tax harmonisation. While the treaty did not deal with these issues directly and Ireland, along with the UK, had already obtained ‘opt-outs’ on many parts of the treaty, these issues were given potency by the new arrangements on voting rights.

The loss of the right of veto on many issues, along with other trends in European governance, thrust the role of the EU’s smaller member states into the spotlight. It was this issue that gave credence to the more far-fetched, often exaggerated concerns expressed above. Whereas Ireland would not have been affected in those areas for now, nothing would prevent them from coming to pass in future. It was no longer good enough for the Irish political elite to hope that, in the words of Valery Giscard D’Estaing (former French President and architect of the failed Constitution),

“Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly.”

Secondly, there are many underlying concerns about the grey areas in the treaty, many of which relate to another agreement signed in Lisbon: the EU’s Lisbon Agenda for making itself the most competitive economic area in the world by 2010. In practice, this has come to mean a move away from the social Europe favoured by many across the EU towards a neo-liberal free trade zone. Left wing commentator Seumas Milne put it best when he said that the Irish government had been

“…unable to explain how the loss of vetoes, opening of health and education to competition, and undermining of workers' pay and conditions could be a good thing.”

Under the guise of administrative efficiency, the treaty does centralise more power in the Commission and the Council, while giving token additional powers to the European and national parliaments and further blurring the lines of accountability and responsibility. Crucially, the primacy of the freedom of markets, rather than the protection of people, is the defining ethos of the text, despite the inclusion of the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Should the treaty ever come into force, governments around Europe will feel increasing pressure to liberalise markets and privatise what remains of their increasingly hollowed-out state sectors. Transport and energy markets are also to be prised open, while workers’ right to strike would be further curtailed.

No to Lisbon does not mean No to Europe
Another tactic of the reflexively pro EU and pro-business elite has been to try to paint the nay-sayers as xenophobic Eurosceptics, opposed in general to the idea of an integrated Europe, or to make them out to be reactionary hicks. However, in reality, while the broad “Church of the No!” campaign undoubtedly included some shrill and hardly progressive voices, the majority of its constituent parts went out of their way to point out that they are actually pro-European. They are simply for a different vision of Europe than the one set forth in the treaty.

While this may be hard to stomach for the neo-liberal visionaries in the Commission, it is the start of a reinvigorated campaign for a people’s Europe rather than a corporate Europe. This could also mark the beginning of the end of elitist efforts to impose Europe from the top-down, rather than making Europe from the bottom up.

A further key question raised by the “no” vote, with direct significance for the Czech Republic, concerns the type of democracy exercised within the EU. It has been repeated in many places that the votes of 1.5 million, with just over half against, should not derail a project that has been approved by the elected governments of hundreds of millions of people, including large countries such as Germany, France, and Spain. While it intuitively makes sense to say that if a majority of Europeans, spoken for by elected representatives, are in favour of the Treaty, then it should go ahead, this takes no account of the source of the EU’s legitimacy and goes against its own premise of being a post-power political organisation.

The EU gains its own legitimacy from the trust that most people still have in their nation states. It then provides a forum for these states, secure in their own identities, to transcend these and to cooperate on issues of mutual importance. As the former British diplomat and current advisor to Solana, Robert Cooper, points out in his book, The Breaking of Nations, the EU has always prided itself on its post-modern, post-power conception . If we have reached a point where the big countries, notably in this instance Germany and France, are effectively saying that this or that country does not count, and we can ride on without them, it changes the whole conception of the Union itself.

President Václav Klaus clearly does not agree with this point of view. After the vote, he stated that:

“The Lisbon Treaty project ended today with the decision of the Irish voters and its ratification cannot be continued.”

Deputy Prime Minister for European Affairs Alexandr Vondra agreed, describing the Franco-German pressure as inappropriate. So, rather than the Irish owing the EU a debt of gratitude for their advancement since becoming members, it is we, European citizens and residents, who are in debt to Irish voters for having given European democracy a shot in the arm and for derailing this elitist train.